The Guardian Cans Its ‘Unsustainable’ Local Websites

Guardian News & Media is ending the project it launched in 2010 to try and figure out the future of local journalism.

“Unfortunately, while the blogs have found engaged local readerships and had good editorial impact, the project is not sustainable in its present form,” writes the publisher’s digital engagement head Meg Pickard. “So, over the next month or so, we’re going to be winding down the Cardiff, Leeds and Edinburgh blogs and retiring the local project.”

Advertisement

Despite selling the regional news division it already owned, GMG had used the Guardian Local project to try finding a new model for online-only local journalism. It hired one “beatblogger” for each of three local sites, headed by Sarah Hartley.

Unchained by the difficult-to-transition machinery of conventional, industrialised news publishing, the blogs have focused on metropolitan civic engagement. They have noticeably enriched the communities of which they are part, finding a new, younger, online audience that wasn’t necessarily reading news about its local community and have helped make connections between people, events, organisations and local issues and politics. Some readers on Twitter and on Guardian.co.uk comments have been expressing their dismay.

But Guardian Local was always an experiment. It survived GNM’s big restructure of 2010, but there was little commercial model of any heft on which it could stand on its own two feet – no significant foray in to dedicated local ad sales, just a city-specific feed of Guardian.co.uk Soulmates dates and, later, small local adds supplied via the Addiply service. It’s understood these £10-a-week small ads made the sites just £500 per year in total.

Despite years of talk, hyperbole and failed experiments in “hyperlocal” journalism, which has been championed by many including the Guardian Local staff, there remain few concrete examples of formalised such efforts becoming commercially sustainable. In the latest re-emergence of the hyperlocal hype curve, some pundits have even been pitching the paradigm to journalism students as the rock-star, enterprise-journalism career to seek out, in an industry where graduate job vacancies have dried up.

GNM’s decision may be one more indication that there is no future for industrialised “hyperlocal” journalism. At least its staff were salaried, trained professionals. But the publisher says it will “integrate communities and topics into our wider site coverage wherever possible” and versions of the idea live on through sites like Northcliffe Media’s LocalPeople, networks like AOL’s Patch, Scotland’s good-looking STV Local and the imminent new UK government-sanctioned local TV network.

Some consolation to the faithful – GNM is also aiming to secure its future at the international, not local, level, by courting a U.S. audience to sell as advertiser scale,

Meanwhile, the many independent, volunteer-run hyperlocal blogs which had already existed prior to each of these exponents will go on publishing, perhaps buoyed by the qualitative, if not commercial, success of Guardian Local.

As always, bottom line is the question of profitability. I am convinced that any site or blog (be it hyperlocal or not) will have a very hard time being profitable if you do not build a business model before you start building the platform itself. Content may be great, participation may be super, the technical platform may be magnificent, it all comes down to nothing more than hobby if the business doesn’t take off. Money doesn’t fall from heaven, hyperlocal penny’s don’t roll your way automatically.
For those who are interested, I will be telling something more about the commercial chances of my own, nationwide hyperlocal network in the Netherlands, during a WAN-based conference in Paris at the end of june. You can already take a sneak preview at eindhoven.dichtbij.nl

What seems to have happened here is that the business model for the sites was the same as that for the Guardian itself and other local newspapers i.e. that public sector advertising would support it. With government ad spend being the first in the firing line and uncertainty as to whether online advertising meets Councils’ statutory obligations this was doomed to failure. From what I saw of the sites they didn’t seem to ever generate the kind of audience that would provide a reasonable revenue from commercial sources. If you are selling prime ad space at Â£10 a week you are never going to build a business. For all the criticism they have received the local newspaper sites seemed to have the edge in content and traffic and they seem to be failing to generate much from their digital operations.

This doesn’t mean hyperlocal in the UK is failing. The examples of successful commercialisation of hyperlocal thus far seem largely confined to London. They seem to be largely based on lifestyle and property advertising revenues which means that hyperlocal looks set for now to be dependent on the ‘local’ bit being an area of relatively high income.

I think if anyone should take heart from the qualitative success of the local site it is existing local newspaper websites. I’m specifically referring to the Guardian Cardiff and Wales Online’s Your Cardiff but suspect the same is true in other cities.
To me it seemed Hannah Waldram, who does an excellent job as the Cardiff reporter, has made the site a success as it understands the open nature of the internet, linking to blogs and other news sites.
Traditional local newspapers have been slow to embrace this and seem to want their sites to be no more interactive than their print products. They however have the advantage of an existing customer base that would probably appreciate a trusted source guiding them online.